PRECA Holistic Therapy (10) – Symptoms of BPD and How They Align with Self-Improvement Goals

If we do not realise that, we will miss what others and the world have to show us. That is why it says:

“Aren’t you curious what will happen? So head to that Grand Canyon or Serengeti fields, lay a bedroll there and sleep tight. Then when you wake up, a new idea will come to you, and lead you somewhere.”

That’s what we must meet: world-forgetting sweetness of sleep, a spark of thought that wake us up from that sleep, and deep continuous thoughts that keep us from sleeping.

Those thoughts will give us new excitement and hope, stir us to open our mouths and hold our pens, and immerse us into that story. We live to do that, not to sleep in a beachside mansion and ride expensive cars and head overseas every holiday.

So, even in the midst of
– battleground
– chaos
– clamour
we need to be able to fall asleep without any problem.

Without struggling to forget and deny the existence of such problem, we need to fall asleep. The actual technique will be practised later and you will get to train this with sleep.

Now let us get started on the actual grasping of the problem. The pathology of this study is borderline personality disorder (BPD). I touched upon the meaning of borderline previously. Not actually ‘crazy’ but hard to say not, thus the borderline between neuroticism and psychosis; that’s how the name came about.

Actually the number of patients with BPD is not low. They have their own community and they share information on good hospitals, great doctors and popular programmes, but they already know: that there is no way out.

They know that it can be almost incurable. Even the patients themselves don’t have much anticipation of cure or improvement. They mostly expect to just alleviate some specific symptoms and ‘get some breathing room’.

Nowadays pharmacological management is actively carried out for personality disorders as well. Just because you are studying this field of study does not mean you should have a negative impression on medications.

Medications have great effect in some aspects. I will touch upon that sometime throughout this series. However, the shortcoming of medications is not about its lack of efficacy.

They are effective, but the problem is about lack of targeted specificity. Things like Leuprorelin have strong effect on patients with sexual obsession, but since the mechanism of human body has yet to be completely unravelled, it exerts effects on various other areas, bringing about lethargy and depression.

Likewise, antidepressants are helpful in management of BPD and you cannot deny their efficacy. However, we cannot expect it to have a targeted effect, creating some reservation in prescribing them.

That’s enough of that, and the rest will be explained in detail and length somewhere down the track.

Firstly, the reason I picked BPD as the model of study for self-improvement is manifold. It includes the fact that they have high intensity of symptoms, but that is not the main reason. It is because the symptoms are wide in range and include vast diversity of problems.

Think of the disorder as a collection of all problems that someone who seeks self-improvement need to know about.

First let us gain simple understanding on the general symptoms of BPD. Each one of these will be covered in detail throughout the series, regarding what causes them, and the therapeutic techniques to be applied.

These are some ‘classic’ or representative symptoms of BPD, going by the DSM criteria. These are still being revised but nothing has changed much. While this can be further broken down into more detailed concepts, if we simplify those, they can be distinguished into three components.

– Sense of identity
– Mood and affect
– Behavioural pattern

These three are the key and they also bear some significance to the field of self-improvement as well.

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I have deliberately transcribed the teachings of my teacher.

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